Change

On the subject of people believing Christians also needed to be circumcised and our thoughts on how difficult it must have been to abandon that idea I write this:  

 

We can only imagine how difficult it was for the church to change it’s understanding of the Bible in the sixteenth century concerning the earth revolving around the sun when Scripture seemed to teach the earth is immovably fixed in space.

 

Christians accepted the "new" interpretation and did not hang on to a "literal" understanding of the "pillars of the earth?"  

 

For Christians the nineteenth century was rough. In a span of about twenty years, three independent, technical and powerful forces converged to challenge the historical reliability of Genesis, not to mention other parts of the Old Testament.

 

One of the three forces was natural sciences advance and its effect on how we understand our planet. In the eighteenth century, geology, showed by the fossil record the earth is millions upon millions of years old---far older than most people had taken for granted and far older than a literal interpretation of the Bible allows. Darwin's work in the nineteenth century followed on the heels of these discoveries. His theory of human origins further challenged the biblical view of the origin of life, to put it mildly.

 

The second force was developments in biblical studies known as biblical criticism; the academic study of the Bible marked mainly by a historical investigation into the date and authorship of biblical books.

 

Complementing the work of biblical criticism was a third factor, biblical archaeology; the growing field of archaeology of ancient Israel and the surrounding area.

 

The nineteenth century was without a doubt a pivotal moment with huge implications for a good many things, including how we read Genesis and thus also for the evolution discussion as well as the discussion of the authorship and dates of the Old Testament including the Pentateuch.

 

As those Christians in the sixteenth-century changed so will we, eventually, and this will be as difficult to accept as it was for those Jews being told what they had practiced their entire life was no longer relevant and the people they considered less than humans were now their brothers and sisters.